IGD740 Indie Game Start-Up Module - Week 2 - Research
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Figure 1: Illustration of Minimal Viable Product (Carsten Schaefer, 2019)
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Know Your Market
This week is all about the marketing side of indie games, Specifically the storytelling of releases through Steam. This is used as estimated data from the trending releases, that can be harnessed to predict a realstic forecast from specific games and adapt that towards our own sales. In addiiton, there will be practical use of a Business Model Canvas, as well as a Lean Canvas to produce a brief business plan and examine how to estimate a potential game's price tag. To familiarise myself with market research and analysis, The weekly forum tasked us with brushing up on some research of two indie game case studies or postmortems and show the differentiations between a business that performed financially well, and a business that met with disappointing sales numbers.
If the infomation is available, we must validate and summarise the developers choices of right and wrong, the game budget they had and how much revenue was made out of it. These sources can range from Google, Youtube, Reddit Gamasutra etc. Our research must be posted and shared onto the topic forum, followed by commenting feedback on other students posts. I struggled to decide on what indie titles to research due to my lack of knowledge on games that have only been referenced for academic purposes. Because of this, I decided to research Limbo and Airscape: The Fall of Gravity as prime indie examples to differentiate not just financially, but commericially.
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Limbo
Figure 2: Limbo, 2010. Playdead. [Online] https://playdead.com/games/limbo/
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Developed and released by Playdead in 2010, Limbo is a colourless 2D puzzle platformer full of daringly hollow landscapes and a journey without meaning to discover and overcome. A nameless boy awakes in the existence between life and death, also referred to as "Limbo" surrounded by danger as he traverses across the gloomy world in search of answers which lead him to his demise (Kevin Wong, 2015). Theories suggest the boy's sister is buring him to indicate further emotonal causes of death. Limbo's idea started off in 2004 with a concept artist from IO Interactive, Arnt Jenson who was feeling a sense of undernourishment from his own work. This sparked his ambitions through concept art to set the mood of Limbo.
In 2006, Limbo's kickstart was solely funded with the developers own finance, comprising of a designer (Jenson) and a programmer named Dino Patti, who he hired through a cinematic trailer to attract programmers to work on Limbo, which in return created substantial hype across the internet. The two maintained the project until their ambitions were too considerable to manage themselves. Eventually, they applied for small grants through the danish government, as well as the Nordic Game Program to fund the intial development (Michael Thomsen, 2010). Playdead had gained A development team of 8, followed by an increase of 16 through freelancers.
The developers did not wish to invest towards major publishers due to retaining full creative control over the game. The initial release of Limbo was to be developed as a free PC title which changed into a retail title due to the increased attention in future consumers. Many alterations were suggested from numerous investors that would have broken the integrity of Jenson's vision. Two months prior to release, A polish was demanded and added to the game which discarded 70% of the content due to being out of context with the game. Limbo was released on the Xbox Live Arcade in 2010, gaining 244,000 players within the first two weeks of purchase.
Self explanatory as Xbox is a major publisher to promote titles through an excellent opportunity. There was mixed confusions regarding platform entries for Limbo on Playstation 3 and Microsoft Windows due to ESRB mistaking two other platforms that were never considered to initally port. Playdead could have easily suggested releasing on Windows but avoided this move due to potential software policy issues. By 2010, the sales had almost doubled since release, projecting a revenue of £7.5 million (Fred Dutton, 2011).
This major step in releasing on a solidly commercial publisher would eventually reach the PC market of steam and Playstation Network in 2011, followed by next-gen patch releases between 2017 and 2018, alongisde the successor of Limbo, Inside.
The overall total of production costs of 15 Million Danish Krone, estimated £1.7 Million that was made through revenue income, enabling Playdead to gain full control of their company back from the early investors and re-establish full independence. It is clear to see how financially well Limbo has sold, but questions to raise is why and how? Not only did they have a substantially large development team for an Indie Studio, but the media coverage from the cinematic trailer raised awareness of a new title in the works, which attacted the attention of potential consumers. Not to mention Xbox Live Arcade promotions has a major boost in marketing visibility (Zeboyd Games, 2010).
Promotion such as the playable demo for Limbo has a 10-12 minute duration of gameplay, leaving players on edge due to a cliffhanger that would urge them to uncover what happens by purchasig the full version. The developers kept to their own visions throughout the 6 years of development, which aided in their natural flow of strong business planning, which secured not just a profitable, but beneficial future for their company.
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Airscape: The Fall of Gravity
Figure 3: Airscape: The Fall of Gravity, 2015. Cross-Product. [Online] https://store.steampowered.com/app/317250/Airscape__The_Fall_of_Gravity/
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Developed and released by Cross-Product in 2015, Airscape: The Fall of Gravity is a 2D action platformer where you play as a crazy yellow Octopus, who has been taken from his watery home and drawn towards an alien planet to save other sea creatures, whilst avoiding a range of dangerous foes, through the use of quirky gravity mechanics. Airscape's development time lasted 3-4 years, worked on by a small indie team of 4 students worldwide who worked mainly part-time aside from one developer, Daniel West who contributed a years wrth of full-time mid-development. The funding on this project is made unclear due to the lack of coverage in the developers sharing their budgets and costs, only to indicate that their project was measurably funded between the team who studied full-time, whilst working on the game on a part-time basis to maintain the balance between their commitments.
The marketing side of the game was covered in a postmortem (Daniel West, 2015) regarding Airscape's commercial failure and to demonstrate that having both a good game and marketing is not enough to succeed in the PC indie market. The first few weeks of sales sat at a total of 150 copies sold on Windows, Linux and Mac. The only positive for the developers was they did not count on financially relying on the game to sell, although it would have been an achievement to them. Aside from a few rewards and strong reviews, Airscape was not selling as intended. Daniel attempts to break down the reasons as to why on both the marketing and the game itself. The early stages of development involved a lot of market research to ensure that Airscape would be prepared at launch, so Daniel personally contacted every area of media possible to spread the word and build hype like press pushes at game events like GDC and PAX East.
This encouraging motive was not enough as he was met with universal disinterest, due to not having a physically functional product to raise stronger awareness such as a kickstarter demo. The next 2 and a half years of marketable action consisted of frequent press and promotion activity through social media, emails and forums. Closer to the launch date, Daniel invested a fair amount of money to hire a professional PR company to take over the marketing towards an improved and professional standard. There was a further level of disappointment as the majority of streamers and journalists did not acknowledge Airscape's release hype. Another motive to consider was that the release date was chosen to estimate no notable releases for Airscape to feature on the consumer spotlight within the metrics-driven frontpage that is Steam.
This would be a short-lived moment for the game as it eventually vanished from the front page of Steam due to the outcome of sales. There were multiple chances for reviewers to write about the game, only to decline even though the game was awarded based on art style, soundtrack and gravity-shifting gameplay. Here lies Daniel's conclusion that "We made a game that nobody wanted to buy". Calling his exaggeration that Airscape does and still has potential, only to find the target audience was not made clear. His marketing research involved indie successes such as Super Meat Boy (Team Meat, 2010) and Hotline Miami (Devolver Digital, 2012) and never observing games between the lines of these titles that would have predicted a securer and stronger commercial outcome.
A post from Reddit regarding the increase in sales for Airscape was shared a year after release, indicating that the counter argument for the game being classed as a commercial failure was to be questioned. A skyrocketing total of 50,000 copies have been sold since launch. Daniel West responded to this forum stating that he sold the distribution rights for Airscape on Steam to another company not long after the postmortem was published (N.D, 2016). This was because the game has been periodically on sale for major discounts and mixed into cheap bundles. This was the reasoning for the miraculous sales increase. Even with the depression of selling the rights to his own game, Daniel still felt content in developing Airscape no matter the results or regrets.
There was some criticism regarding the postmortem that discussed the faults in Daniel West, not comprehending that marketing heavily relies on good product development which does not just consist of a successful product or uniqueness, but having a strong understanding in what people (target audience) really want and to draw in a specific crowd (Kristeen Romero, 2015). This leads people to see a product description with some significance as to why they should invest. It appears that Daniel did not take into account how the decline of media outlets could have been questioned earlier to Airscape's audience and avoid further disinterest. The game, website and language used demonstrated that the developers approach to marketing, had no life in an audience.
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Lecture 2
This weeks lecture dives into several areas regarding how to create a viable game product, from forecasting sales potentials, what type of game concepts to pursue and identufying the potential blanks in the market to fill with unique prospects. Iain starts off with discussing about how game development is paramount to us not just as an individual, but as an indie. This draws all sorts of paths towards a career or personal hobby. The questions are does it provide all effort and passion in return through success and profit? Or does it becom a spiral of making something that will become nothing? Personally, I see two career goals in where I intend to head with the assistance of this course. The first goal, applying for a small indie studio and work my way up towards a potential triple A company.
Alternatively, lecturing at a university in my own area of expertise whilst creating games as a part-time indie. Either way, I positively end up in a field that I know will be within the industry that I thrive on. The financial side would satisfy my day to day needs should I need to invest in potential products and services to aid towards future projects. I have a mixed interest of genres which I consider to be a positive outlet as it enables me to demonstrate a broad area of games instead of sticking to a fixed type. The indie breakthrough is always about what game you should make. I found the lecture slide referring to a triple-convergence model known as the Venn diagram very useful as it establishes a core focus on market visbility. Below is an illustration of the mentioned lecture slide.
Figure 4: What Game Should You Make Slide (iain Lobb, 2021)
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I found this Venn diagram to be more insightful compared to the original intersection which covers games you want to make, games you're good at making and games you want to have made (Derek Yu, 2010). The revised Venn diagram differs by creating a market approach in choosing an idea you want to make, able to make and will make enough profit to cover the development costs (Ryan Clark, 2018). I am very fond of genres that are combined such as horror and puzzle games which gives a much darker and unsettling appeal, attempting to tackle a mind boggling puzzle, whilst unaware of what lies in the background whether that be the visuals or sound. I have a broad idea in what I want my game to be, provided I have obtained enough research to predict a promising addition to the indie market. Referring back to forecasting sales, the use of wishlisting is a golden source when it comes to estimating and predicting your games sales.
Steam specifically rallys alot of attention to increase revenue predictions early-on. Another resourceful tool that calculates revenue from games on Steam is known as the Boxleiter method or Boxleiter Number (Ian Boudreau, 2020). This type of method has the ability to use the number of reviews on a game to estimate the number of owners of that game. This calculates a gross revenue through various adjustments such as discounting, VAT, returns etc to get a rough estimation on the net revenue. By the looks of the shared slide during the lecture, the net sales for a roughly estimated indie game sold is barely a third of profit ($7,419) compared to the gross sales ($22,500). This will be even more of a challenge to reach a profitable amount such as that in a market that hardly has any blanks filled, as well as working within a small company which results in less income.
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Lean Canvas
This weeks activity has tasked us with creating a Lean Canvas Model to assist in outlining the areas of our business as an Indie, in preparation to consider what choices we decide to make. My questions was where to start? it wasn't until I was working around lunchtime when a game concept appeared in my mind, consisting of a maze game that is uniquely designed to both engage and immerse a player through sub-genre of puzzle and horror elements. This made me think about what would be a strong selling point. This would be a combination between gameplay and visuals that demonstrates the game is different and worth paying attention. I also ensured that customer segments, also referred to as target demographic is based around individuals that have an essence of passion and obsession when it comes to sub-genre titles. This Model will assist towards the assessment in the following weeks to come as a business proposal is required for our proposed indie gam. I look forward piecing together my idea. Below is an illustration of my Lean Canvas.
Figure 5: Labyrinthian Lean Canvas Model (Kyle Cornwell, 2021)
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References:
Limbo, 2010. Playdead [Online] Available at: https://playdead.com/games/limbo/ [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Kevin Wong, 2015. The Most Depressing Theories On What Limbo Means. [Online] Available at: https://kotaku.com/the-most-depressing-theories-on-what-limbo-means-1724276367 [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Michael Thomsen, 2019. How Limbo Came To Life. [Online] Available at: https://www.ign.com/articles/2010/09/14/how-limbo-came-to-life [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Fred Dutton, 2011. Limbo racks up one million sales. [Online] Available at: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-11-10-limbo-racks-up-one-million-sales [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Zeboyd Games, 2010. Thoughts on Limbo's Sales Success. [Online] Available at: https://zeboyd.com/2010/07/29/thoughts-on-limbos-sales-success/ [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Airscape: The Fall of Gravity, 2015. Cross-Product. [Online] Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/317250/Airscape__The_Fall_of_Gravity/ [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Daniel West, 2015. 'Good' isn't good enough - releasing an indie game in 2015. [Online] Available at: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-good-isn-t-good-enough---releasing-an-indie-game-in-2015 [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Super Meat Boy, 2010. Team Meat. [Online] Available at: http://www.supermeatboy.com/ [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Hotline Miami, 2012. Devolver Digital. [Online] Available at: https://hotlinemiami.com/ [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
N.D, 2016. Airscape: The Fall of Gravity eventually sold around 50 000 copies (less than 150 on release) - was the game a commercial failure after all? [Online] Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameDealsMeta/comments/51qq4e/airscape_the_fall_of_gravity_eventually_sold/ [Lasr Accessed 29/10/2021]
Kristeen Romero, 2015. Sorry, Daniel West. Airscape: The Fall of Gravity is not a “good” game. [Online] Available at: https://panickedpixel.com/2015/10/07/sorry-daniel-west-airscape-the-fall-of-gravity-is-not-a-good-game/ [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Iain Lobb, 2021. Week 2: Lecture: Creating a Viable Game Product. [Online] Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/924/pages/week-2-lecture-creating-a-viable-game-product?module_item_id=57436v [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Derek Yu, 2010. Finishing a Game. [Online] Available at: https://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Ryan Clark, 2018. Graphic Sources. [Online] Available at: https://prezi.com/u2z3vns0z8wp/graphic-sources/ [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
Ian Boudreau, 2020. You can estimate how many copies a game has sold on Steam using reviews. [Online] Available at: https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/number-of-copies-sold [Last Accessed 29/10/2021]
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